To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Jake Marmer: Nigun Poems & Poetics

[Originally published in Current
Musicology's recent issue on “experimental writing about music.”]

Preface

This set of poems grew out
of my experiences of listening and finding myself inside nigunim (pl; singular nigun
or nign), Chassidic chants — mystical, usually wordless songs used
as accompaniment for rituals — weddings, prayers, candle-lightings —
collective beckoning of transcendence. The nigun experience is fraught with
what Amiri Baraka called, referring to blues, the “re/feeling” — proximity
and shape of personal history of encounters with

unfathomable.

Because most of the nigunim
did not have lyrics they were comprised of scat — but a somber sort of
a scat: “oi-oi”, “di-dai”, “bah-bom,” etc. Musical instruments were not used
to accompany them either, since most of the singing happened on the
Sabbath when instruments were put away. Rid of accompaniment, rid
of lyrics, these stripped down chants were visceral and prayer-like
but washed out of content and filled, instead, with implication — with
attempts. At the climax of one of his talks, balancing at the edge of the cognitive void,
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov reportedly said: “And even to this, too, there’s
an answer. But that answer is necessarily a song.”

These poems attempt to reimagine the sensation of
locating oneself inside a nigun.

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A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]